Sunday, December 21, 2008

Nov 29 and 30, 2008 was a fun-filled weekend - 2 days of total beach frisbee in Chennai. It was the CUF Nationals 2008, organised by the Chennai Ultimate Frisbee club (www.chennaiultimatefrisbee.com ). Manu , Mama, Abhi , Subbu and others had put in a lot of effort to organise the tournament - Got permission to play on the beach under lights , overcame a bad weather bout when the whole city was under the water and many more. Ultimately, the tournament turned out to be a super hit, with teams coming all the way from Colombo ( Serendiscity ) , Delhi ( Stray Dogs with Sweaters ) , Mumbai ( Stormchasers - hats off, they came over just after the Mumbai shooting incidents ) and Bangalore ( 2 teams - Learning to fly ( LTF ) and Disc o Deewanae ( DOD ). There were 2 teams from Chennai - CULtimate ( i played for this team ) and Live-wire. Everyone enjoyed immensely, made friends and all went back with great memories.

I enjoyed the games immensely, myself. We had an easy first round - we won 2 games Vs Delhi and Mumbai comfortably but lost 1 game to Bangalore ( Learning to Fly team ). The semifinal between Cultimate and DOD was the closest game of the tournament - we led 7-3 and DOD climbed past us and were up 8-7. It was an intense 1 hour+ game, under the lights. We managed to win the game, though, by a whisker. Manu / Abhi / Mama / Subbu pulled a miracle of sorts - they managed to have the semi-finals under the lights at the beach. That brought in a lot of crowd and hometeam ( us!!! ) got a lot of support. Over 500 people were watching us play and it sure was an awesome experience!

LTF played against the Serendiscity in the other semifinals. It was a close one as well - Colombo fought hard. But the lack of subsititutes proved costly - they ran out of gas and LTF won the semis. The finals was played on Sunday morning - LTF won this game against Cultimate. We started off well, scoring a point more than the LTF guys at each stage. But they took off after 4 points and eventually won the game 9-6.